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Cracking up: It wasn’t the sky that fell

No fair! The early bird whose chirping woke me has gone back to sleep. Yet I’m awake, too near the ceiling, pondering whether or not to put the latest household dilemma into print.

A friend several states away, in response to my woeful news, emailed saying, “I expect to read all about it in your column.” So here goes:

Had this month’s Friday the 13th occurred last month, it would have made me a believer as to the date’s bad vibes. It was on the second Friday of March that I unlocked our front door, stepped into the entrance way, and sensed — or was it heard — something amiss.

Does a ceiling’s stomach growl? That’s what the low mutters coming from the living room sounded like. So I looked up.

Several years ago in Los Angeles, Calif., I’d watched lava pits lazily burble up. An upside down version of that scenario was happening along fault lines in our living room ceiling.

At the same time, a serious crack began developing horizontally, connecting those lines.

Just inside the room, a stack of music I needed for an upcoming program lay defenseless on the organ bench. In a rare spurt of heroism (or desperation at the thought of having to change my tune) I retrieved the music.

Then, whuuuuummmmp, the ceiling fell, knocking the organ bench under the console.

A billowing cloud of debris engulfed me and continued down the hall into every room. A section of the ceiling over two feet across and a third the length of the room now resembled a playground slide leading from emptiness to the floor. Ancient insulation covered everything, looking as if a dingy cotton field had upchucked.

There wasn’t much to do but cough. And tell Jesse who, among other reactions, called folk who were already scheduled to deal with the problem.

Thus began a weekend of coughing. Meanwhile, our living room furniture multiplied at an alarming rate so that, when relocated, it took up every spare inch of space in the rest of the house. (It got so crowded, the organ bench, foot pedal-board, and console were in three separate rooms.)

Let the hammering begin, muted by a multitude of tarps across doorways.

Then, hooray! We had a lovely new ceiling with nary a wrinkle or stretch mark.

Next came a siege of wall-washings etc. When a helper who bore the brunt of the clean-up effort first saw pictures of our insulation-infested living room, her first question was, “Did you clean all that up?”

Not quite. The effort involved trailers and truckloads being hauled off. For most of the week, we resembled a construction site. And were glad of it.

However … in the new light of this calamity, creepy-crawly lines of long standing in the bedroom ceiling, though not historically problematic like those in the living room (which had already been repaired more than once), suddenly seemed less innocent.

Hence, more hammering; more tarps; and, to a degree, more dusty fallout as the bedroom ceiling descended on purpose.

Let the record show: A premeditated ceiling removal is a thousand times more live-with-able than the “oops” version. Clothes, knickknacks, pictures, books, smaller furniture can be moved ahead of time. And plans can be in place for where the big stuff can go.

Not that even premeditated plans are perfect. My suggestion was to simply plop the displaced mattress atop the one on the guest bedroom bed. This turned out to be a less than ideal solution. For now, literally climbing into bed involves the kitchen step stool — a small price to pay for a future worry-free bedroom ceiling.

Speaking of worry. This close encounter with the guest room ceiling is revealing minuscule cracks I’d never notice from a lower altitude …